Meet Your Models

Memories Of The Past

Given the state of storage technology in recent years, and then comparing it to say, 1995, when a 2GB HDD was considered state-of-the-art, the pinnacle for storage space and compare it to the 320GB, 500GB and 1TB models of today, you'll be totally flabbergasted for words. Now imagine what it would be like in 10 years time when we look back on our current 1TB models as an antique model while we all use ultra high capacity drives in the range of Petabytes and probably relying on solid state drives or even holographic storage technology! Mind boggling indeed, even for us.

Of course, let's not forget that while our storage capacity will increase, our requirements will likewise increase. Take the current digital explosion for example, where movies, videos and music all form part of our current lifestyle requirements; can you imagine not listening to your 8GB MP3 player or snapping photos with your 8MP digital camera? Or when HD multimedia files become the norm?

While most people store their data on their computer, should a problem arise and with no way of recovery but to reformat the hard disk, one would potentially lose a lifetime's worth of data and beautiful memories. The only solution to prevent this loss would be to conduct regular backups and face it, with our reliance on the digital medium; backing up our data seems like a really good idea in the long run.

To complement that line of thought, in this article, we test drive three ready-to-use retail external storage drives of 750GB in capacity: the Buffalo DriveStation Turbo USB, the Seagate FreeAgent Pro and the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus. Of course there's always the DIY route to external storage drives and for this reason, we've also compared the retail ready-to-use drives against the DIY option for knowledge sake and point of comparison in terms of usability, performance and cost. So keep on reading for our impressions and findings, but to start off here's a table of summary of the models that are compared in this article:-